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Forum:Chinese Characters
As this game is based around Chinese culture, the use of the Chinese writing system is going to be a significant feature to many elements of this game, including the names of the legends that we have already created articles for. Here is the dilemma: This game is being marketed (since it is a Jagex game) to a mostly American (speaking broadly here of both North and South America) and European market. By far and away the majority of those who visit this website will not have Chinese fonts installed on their computer... but at the same time it would be nice to be able to display these characters for all those who would be interested in this game. We have two real options here to work with this: # Say essentially, who cares? Put in the Chinese characters as Unicode and if somebody wants to actively use this website they should install a Chinese character font. This makes our job of editing this website much easier, as we simply use text editing tools to add the Chinese letters and leave the actual rendering issues to the end-user's web browser. It also seems like a major turn-off for players wanting to find information about this game. # Render all Chinese characters as png files. We do have resources such as the Wikimedia Commons that has many of these characters already rendered as individual characters, but creating these characters as images is relatively trivial as well. There are fonts that can be downloaded fairly easily enough for free (some that cost some real serious amounts of money, but that is a separate issue) to enable dedicated wiki editors who want to contribute to these image files easily enough. This can be rendered using GIMP or any other photo manipulation tool, or even a custom application that I could write if we want to make this easier. The issue is mainly the effort of creating the image files, uploading them to the wiki, and then adding them into the respective articles as images (that may take a little bit of work). This route takes more effort on our part as wiki editors, but it allows for this wiki to be viewed by many more people without a rendering issue showing up. I'm willing to create at least some of these Chinese characters, but we should also try to establish some standards in terms of what font we will be using so we have some consistency across the whole wiki as well. For now, this is an issue if we are even going to create the characters as image files or if we will simply use unicode. --Robert Horning 18:02, January 10, 2010 (UTC) Discussion I think we should probably wait until the game is released to see just how much Jagex use Chinese characters. I would expect them not to be used much, and therefore not be a big issue for us. I also think that our main aim should be to provide a useful resource for the majority of players of the game. Quartic ~ insanity is a virtue | Talk 18:05, January 10, 2010 (UTC) :Other than I want to use them right now is my main gripe. King Zhou is 帝辛. I'd like to start some info boxes that would display these characters in the infobox. It is a part of the background and culture related to this game... even for what we have currently. These characters will very much be a part of this game, even if players aren't necessarily going to be expected to type them in. --Robert Horning 18:21, January 10, 2010 (UTC) I agree that we should wait and see how much they are used, because so far we have not seen any calligraphy out of Jagex. If it is heavily used in the game, I think that it would be best to use the font. If it is used occasionally, I think we should use .png files. And if it is not used at all, we could still use some .png files for some of the trivia. :If we do use the font, we should have a template that explains how to view them correctly. Quartic ~ insanity is a virtue | Talk 18:23, January 10, 2010 (UTC) Heh I can't read chinese characters on my pc yet. I found this article that explains how to install the font: Multilingual support 12:50, January 12, 2010 (UTC) :By far and away the "best" multi-lingual font that I've found that is free can be found on this website: http://www.code2000.net/ :Not only is the price good (free, but the author does ask for donations to help support the website), it is also the most complete font that has more character glyphs for more languages than any other font that I have seen on the internet. This includes especially more characters for Chinese... last time I checked it was something like 50,000 characters in this font and may be more. Most commercial Chinese fonts are about 25,000 glyphs... if you can even order them at all as you have to read Chinese to be able to order them in the first place and pay for them with Chinese or Tawainese currency. --Robert Horning 15:50, January 12, 2010 (UTC) ::Umm... Microsoft Windows 的語言包 看起來良好 .. Rather stick with the files from MS which are 250 mb then that pack you are offering, which is 3.5 gb and includes Tibetan, russian, greek, thai, ethiopic and more. ;-P 16:26, January 12, 2010 (UTC) :::It is a fair bit smaller than that.... it is 3.5 MB in size, somewhat smaller than the 250 MB pack you are talking about from Microsoft. What you get from downloading the Microsoft pack is what is called the "Input Method Editor", also simply called the IME. This allows you to actually compose Chinese characters with a keyboard... but that takes some considerable skill and linguistic ability. It really isn't needed for casual usage and display of Chinese characters, but if you want to "compose" a character rather than copy/paste those characters from say Wikipedia, you have to enter it as an "alt-code" and type in the full Unicode number without the IME. That is sort of a pain in the behind for more than just a couple of characters. --Robert Horning 19:20, January 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::Oops mistake on my side, thanks for the explanation! 19:49, January 12, 2010 (UTC) But to go back ontopic, I would say that, for now, we stick to using unicode to display Chinese characters. We can discuss this further once the game is online, and then we see how big the influence is of chinese characters in WoL. 16:37, January 12, 2010 (UTC) :Fair enough. This is a decision that doesn't need an immediate answer, but I do think it will be an ongoing question that will impact the player community in multiple ways. --Robert Horning 19:20, January 12, 2010 (UTC) I'm not sure how many characters there are in the language, but maybe we can make each unicode into a template so it's much easier. We could then make a page listing all of the templates and the characters. 22:45, January 12, 2010 (UTC) :Altogether, there are about 500,000 characters in the Chinese language, although only about 30,000-50,000 are common for an "educated" Chinese reader (aka somebody with a university-level education that is native to China). A high school graduate is presumed to have learned between 15,000-20,000 characters, and the newspapers typically stick to a core of about 10,000 characters for most of what they publish. It is typically in names, however, where the unusual characters seem to come from. A template may work for most of what is seen in this game, however. --Robert Horning 23:20, January 12, 2010 (UTC) ::I'm Chinese myself, if anything, I could help, I personally recommend the characters instead of images, and I recommend that we put Traditional as well as Simplified Characters in. Btzkillerv 09:11, January 13, 2010 (UTC) :::Yeah, no matter what, I don't want them to be image files >.<. 03:15, January 14, 2010 (UTC) The game isn't really at all in Chinese, so I think we should just keep everything in English here. 01:54, February 3, 2010 (UTC) ::::I'm sort of disappointed in the mundane and ordinary legends, although the key legends may still play a significant part in the end-game. It will be interesting to see how it all works out. I have seen some portions of the game with buttons and words in Chinese that apparently haven't been translated yet (I submitted the appropriate bug reports), but for the most part, yeah, Chinese characters aren't nearly so big of a deal here. --Robert Horning 05:59, February 3, 2010 (UTC) :::::Where have you seen the buttons? I would like to see one! 13:21, February 3, 2010 (UTC) ::::::Here is an example from an in-game message that appeared: ::::::::Player Nicevilleg found treasure Bronze Box*1个 in Forest Explore of Level 5 ::::::If all you see is the square retangle "default glyph" in your web browser, that is because it is Chinese and not a Latin character. The symbol "个" represents the word for forest in Chinese.... sort of appropriate I might add, even though odd to see in a game marketed to a western audience and is supposedly localized into English. For myself, I wish that more Chinese characters would play a part in some context, but it is in the more obscure places that I have seen them. As for buttons.... you really have to dig them up. I saw some, but I need to dig in again and see just where that is at. It isn't some place you can look right away, as buildings need to be built and is for an advanced gameplay situation that many players don't get at right away. If I find a good example, I'll make a screen shot and post it here. --Robert Horning 04:15, February 4, 2010 (UTC)